Link Merchant Center and Google Ads

With both Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts, you can take advantage of retail-centric Google Ads campaign tools and the data-centric power of Merchant Center to improve your presence on the web. Product data in Merchant Center can also be used to set up campaigns for dynamic remarketing, local inventory ads, and more.

In countries that are part of the European Economic Area (EEA) and in Switzerland, you participate in Shopping ads through one or several Shopping Comparison Services of your choice. Some CSSs manage your product data and your campaigns on your behalf, while others provide tools allowing you to manage your setup yourself. Learn more about advertising with Comparison Shopping Services in Europe

What is Merchant Center?

Merchant Center is a platform that allows you to upload your store and product data to Google and make it available for use with your Google Ads account and other Google Services. Learn more about Google Merchant Center.

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is an online advertising program that allows you to reach new audiences with targeting, bidding, keywords, and more. Learn more about Google Ads.

Why link Google Ads to Merchant Center

When you approve a link between your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts, you'll allow your product data to flow from Merchant Center to Google Ads for use in advertising campaigns. Depending on which type of product data you submit, you can create Shopping campaigns to advertise your products, use dynamic remarketing to drive your Display campaigns, and more.

What happens when you link Merchant Center and Google Ads

Only a Merchant Center account user can request to link the accounts. New account link requests will appear in your Google Ads account on your "Linked accounts" page, which is located in the Settings drop-down menu.

Once the Google Ads account owner approves the request, some information is shared between accounts. The Merchant Center's product information is available in Google Ads for campaign creation. Certain Google Ads statistics like clicks are shown in the linked Merchant Center account.

Google Ads account owners and either admin or standard Merchant Center users can remove the link at any time. Neither party can make changes in the other linked account. For instance, the Merchant Center account owner cannot pause or start campaigns, or make changes to bids in the linked Google Ads account.

If you remove the account link, Shopping campaigns that rely on product data from this Merchant Center account will stop serving ads. You also won't be able to create new campaigns in Google Ads based on product data from this Merchant Center account.

Before you begin

You'll need:

Access to a Merchant Center account

You’ll need to have admin access to your Google Ads account to link Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts. If you don't have admin access, you can ask the administrator of your Google Ads account to grant you access, or to link the accounts for you.

Instructions

The new Google Ads experience is now the exclusive way for most users to manage their accounts. If you’re still using the previous AdWords experience, choose “previous” below. Learn more

Below you can learn how to:

Request to link to AdWords from Merchant Center

Approve link requests from Merchant Center in AdWords

Manage links between accounts

Track link statuses

Request to link Merchant Center to AdWords

You'll need to initiate the link from Merchant Center. You can link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Merchant Center account, and a single AdWords account can be linked to multiple Merchant Center accounts.

In your Merchant Center account, go to the 3-dot icon menu and and then click Account linking.

Select AdWords.

Under “Your AdWords Account,” find the AdWords customer ID of the account you want to link. You can find the customer ID at the top of any AdWords page when you're signed in, near your email address.

Click Link.

Note: If you don’t have an AdWords account, you can click Create account on this page.

Approve link requests from Merchant Center in AdWords

When a Merchant Center account sends you a request to link, these invitations will appear in the table on your "Linked accounts" page in AdWords.

Click the gear icon (), then select Linked accounts from Account settings and open the Google Merchant Center section.

Click the View request button.

Review the request details. Linking the accounts doesn't grant administrative access to either account holder, and either you or the Merchant Center account holder can unlink the accounts at any time.

To approve the link, click Approve.

To reject this link, click Reject and confirm that you want to reject it. If you want to link these accounts later, you'll need to send a new link request from Merchant Center.

Manage links between accounts

Once you've linked Merchant Center and AdWords accounts, you can cancel or resend link requests from Merchant Center, or unlink any account at any time from either Merchant Center or AdWords.

In Merchant Center

To cancel a link request:

Sign in to your Merchant Center account.

Click the 3-dot icon menu.

Choose Linked accounts.

In the AdWords tab, you’ll see the request listed with the customer ID of the AdWords account.

On the right, click Cancel request.

When prompted, click Continue.

To unlink accounts:

Click the 3-dot icon menu.

Choose Account linking.

Go to Your AdWords account or Other AdWords accounts.

Click Unlink.

In AdWords

To unlink accounts:

Click the gear icon (), then select Linked accounts from Account settings and open the Google Merchant Center section.

Click View details.

Next to the Merchant Center customer ID you want to unlink from, click Unlink.

Track link statuses in AdWords

Below are the statuses you might see in the linked accounts table for Merchant Center in your AdWords account.

Needs your approval: The account owner from this Merchant Center account has requested to link to your AdWords account. You can approve or reject their requests.

Linked: Your AdWords account has been linked to this Merchant Center account, and the remarketing lists for the apps in the account have been activated.